Reusing the OpenCare/RECODE approach: "Understanding populism" in Horizon 2020

Here is an example text that we could use to get in touch with researchers and practitioners as mentioned above.


Dear ____ ,

I am _____ at Edgeryders, an Estonian SME with a strong presence in Brussels.

We are considering applying to a Horizon 2020 topic called GOVERNANCE-03-2018, “Understanding populism”. We understand you have been involved in a project called __________; based on that, we thought maybe you are considering it too. In that case, we wonder if you would consider us as a partner.

Unlike you, we are not domain experts on populism. Our contribution to a proposal to the “Understanding populism” topic would be a work package to build a very large scale ethnographic study that would uncover what populist societal dynamics looks like to populists themselves, and to those on the receiving end of it. This could be used to illuminate and validate the hypotheses produced by domain experts like you.

We can do this based on a novel method called Semantic Social Network Analysis. The main idea is to foster an online conversation; perform ethnographic coding on it; then use graph theory and some software to build a network of ethnographic codes that represent the conversation. You can think of it as a collective mental map of the problem at hand. This comes with a filtering technique that allows human researchers to make sense of even very large graphs, with thousands of contributions and ethnographic codes.

If this sounds interesting, let me know. I’ll be happy to discuss it and answer any questions.

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